Making the Attic room warmer.

dickibobboy

Hi everyone. I am looking for some (cheap!) advice on making the attic room warm.

To give a little idea.

The house is a semi and is farily old, brick. It is not the most enegery efficient due to the fact that its old. It has the ground floor, first floor then the attic (im pretty sure it was a conversion at one point as the house did used to be one big one but was split into two). It also has a cellar that does get pretty cold because it has the old coal hole or somethng (around the size of A4 paper) and slides up and off. Curtains are hung at the bottom of the stairs and there is a door to help with keep drafts away. Anyway the rest of the house is fine its the attic.

The room has crawl through spaces which is basically where the roof goes low and it is just floor beams (and storage for me!) if you look up there is just the roof tiles and small gaps between the top bricks and roof tiles in places. quite a draft can get through when i have been in at times. No insulation is my first thing. The walls in the room are just simple plasterboard on the two sides for the roof and brick on the other two walls for the outside wall and the party wall and the doors are small and i mean small wooden ones that just pop out for you to get into.

The other roof space is the same as the other, although not as breezy as the one at the back end of the house.

The window is a standard double glazed one that is builtout of the roof (ie, not a skyline one) this is fine.

The floor doesnt feel to be cold anywhere, apart from when the room is cold.

The radiator in the room is another problem. Where as the ones around the house can be too hot to touch. The one in this room can be just warm and im not sure about the situation of which is hotter top or bottom until i switch the system back on tomorrow. From what i remember it was the opposite way and was wamer at the top than bottom which means it is has rubbish and needs flushing (can be expensive) I have just bled the radiator and while some hissing came out of it i heard no more and i did not get any liquid either. I will see how the bleeding went tomorrow when the heating goes on. Obviously the radiator is the highest end one just about above the boiler.

I was thinking about getting an oil filled radiator to keep the chill off the room. At some point i can see my own breath if i stay on the pc at night at the early hours of the morning, we don't keep the heating on but still.

Any suggestions?

I was thinking about the B&Q insulation that they have on the cheap and lining the roof with it and around the edge where the wall stops and roof begins. Good idea that should help do you think?

The one thing i don't want to do is cause any problems with reguards to a little bit of damp the house has in one corner, its mainly affecting the second floor bedroom and hopefully will be sorted when the roof is repaired (a tile or two missing and one above the corner, we think rain water is getting in and causing it)

Thanks.